9 Ways to Improve

You’re website reads well and you’re proud of it. But, you’ve tried and tried to create something that looks good too, and you can’t seem to get it together. You’re waiting for rave reviews but none have come your way. Your website is a flop. Not to worry. You’re not alone. You want to fix it but think you don’t have the big budget you need to hire a great web developer. Chëck out some simple ways 1260 can improve your website and get it into better shape, now!

1. Balance your page
When users enter a website, their focus first starts at the top left of the page, and hovers there before slowly tracking to the right. Contrary to what many think, the web user is focused more on the text of the page, rather than images or graphics. This is where balance comes into place.
Balance will not only make your page more visually appealing, but it will make your page easier to read and items easier to find. A good layout will help the objects on your page to flow.

2. Keep it simple
Less is more. Clean your website up by removing all the unnecessary visual elements. This will allow important items to stand out. Leave some white space on the page. The illusion of space is visually pleasing, as well as easier to navigate. Otherwise, your visitor will get whiplash by darting their head from left to right in an attempt to look at all the information crammed on your screen. Or worse, they’ll clíck on out of there in a hurry.

3. Fix your fonts
The size and type of font you select will have an effect on how your reader takes in your information. What font should you use? San-serif fonts such as Arial and Verdana are popular choices for on-screen reading. And keep the size in mind too. The font size should be no smaller than 10 points and no largër than 14 points. You don’t want the reader to be able to read the information from across the room, but you don’t want them squinting and leaning closer to the monitor either.

4. Clean backgrounds
Go subtle. The background textures and colors chosen have the ability to gauge the overall appeal of the website. Lots of texture and graphics in the background can be distracting, and the more texture added to the background, the less noticeable your text and images become.

If you’re going to use a color on the background, make sure there is a significant contrast between the background color and the text. Strike a good balance, or you may compromise the readability of the text. Make good choices. You will rarely go wrong with black text on a white background. It’s crisp, clean, and easy to read. Be cautious when using darker and brighter colors such as red or yellow. They cause visual fatigue and the reader will löse their focus on the text.

5. Graphics
Graphics are often overused on webpages. One often clutter the pages with objects that look cool but serve no purpose other than to íncrease the download time. Here are some instances where you can use graphics to enhance your pages:
Logo – Your logo is your brand recognition and it adds visual appeal to your webpages.
Title bars – The title bar lets your visitors know which page they are on.
Horizontal rules – Graphic lines are often used to separate categories or sections of a webpage.
Background images – Are used to add visual appeal or make a web site easier to navigate.
Photos – Personalize a website and make it inviting.

Navigation icons, such as `home’ and ‘back’ enhance a page because they are familiar and users anticipate seeing them.

6. Easy navigation
Have a toolbar with links that are easy to navigate. Position the toolbar in an area that makes sense. Web users often look for the toolbar across the top or down the left hand side of the page. Going with the norm will create a sense of familiarity and facilitate the ease of navigation.

7. Text readability
You have great copy, but are you displaying it effectively? 1260 makes your pages easy to read, break up blocks of text and create short paragraphs.
Consider the key points on each page and create headings and subheadings.
Only use one or two fonts. Select one font for your headings and subheadings and another for the body text.

Highlight key words and phrases by bolding or using a different color. Be careful when selecting colors, and don’t use every color in the rainbow. Many, such as yellow and pink, don’t stand out well if you’ve selected a white or black background.

8. Scrolling
Horizontal scrolling? Yikes. That needs to go, now! Users hate, hate, hate to scroll left to right. It’s disorienting and annoying, so if you’ve got it, löse it. Vertical scrolling is ok if you have to have it, but consider moving largër blocks of information to another page and providing links. There’s also the danger of missing vital information that falls below the screen if a user decides not to scroll down to view it. So if you’ve got to have a scrolling page, try to keep all your important information above the fold.

9. Make it quick
We all get impatient when it takes more than 5 seconds to connect to a website. Users want to make contact, and make it quick. 1260 ensures that your pages load as quickly as possible. Eliminate unnecessary graphics, especially flash graphics…they can be time hogs. You need to make an immediate impression, and the only impression you’re leaving as your page slowly grinds in to view is “this page sucks”…if they’re still there to see it at all.

Some Things To Consider When Evaluating Your Website

You have either put a lot of effort into your website or you tried to save money and have a beginner put the effort in for you. Either way, whatever the purpose of the website, you want to get the most out of it. The question now becomes, how you can tell if your website is likely to succeed.

Why?
The first thing to do is to ask yourself why you have set up the website. Are you trying to sell a product or provide information or something else? What do you want to happen when a visitor lands on your pages? “For a man without a destination no wind is favourable” (An old saying attributed to many). If you do not know exactly what you want to happen, how can you expect the visitors to your website to know and do it? You are the one who ought to have the site set up to direct people to their destination. If you don’t know what that is, then all is lost.
Your visitors probably know why they visited your site. You too must know why they came and help them do what they came to do. If your website does not provide what they need they will move on to another one. Just because you are getting all the traffic you could hope for does not mean that your site will succeed.

Your Website’s Conversion Rate
You will need to measure your success rate. There are a number of ways to do this. One is the Conversion rate. Simply put, the conversion rate is the rate at which you convert visitors into buyers. Or if you are not selling it is the rate at which you convince people to do whatever it is you need them to do. It could be to sign up for your newsletter of subscribe to something else, etc. If you have one hundred visitors to your website per day and you convert two, your conversion rate is two percent.

It is a reasonably good measure of the quality of your website. If your site is not converting, you will know that you need to make changes to the site. However, it could also mean that your marketing or advertising campaign is sending untargeted traffic to your site. In other words sending visitors who are not in the least bit interested in what you have to offer.

SEO & Traffic Generation
The whole point of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is traffic generation. The idea is that you optimise or fine tune your website so that it gets to the top of the search results when people enter a search term that is contained in your website. You do this to get traffic. If your site is not properly optimised people are unlikely to find it. Unless of course you have found some narrow niche that nobody else has heard of, which will not bring a lot of visitors. SEO involves using the correct keywords in the correct way and arranging the contents and menus in the right way and most important of all is link building.

To rank highly, at the time of writing, the single most important thing to do to rank highly in the search engines is to increase the number of links to your site from quality websites which have content related to the subject of your site.

Content
It may sound obvious to most people but, the content of your website should be based on the subject of your product. For example if your website is set up to sell computers then it should contain articles about computers and computing etc. not gardening articles. If you have articles on unrelated subjects they will only serve to confuse your visitors and undermine your website’s and your own credibility as a sourct of products and information about computers or whatever your website is promoting.

The content should be keyword rich but not saturated or you may show up on spam radar. The content should be broken up into manageable paragraphs and properly laid out with headers for each section, making it easier to read and navigate.

Navigation
Getting the visitors to your website is only half of the battle. You then must give them what they want. What do they want? Well, the first thing they want is to find their way around your website without pulling their hair out in frustration. These days there is far too much competition on the internet for that to happen. They will move to another website at the first sign of difficulty.

Arrange all the links and buttons in a way that is easy to read and understand. Do not over fill each page. If there is too much choice people do not make a choice they just get confused and… you guessed it. They move to another website or don’t see all that you have to offer.

The first page they land on, usually the index page should be interesting. It should be obvious to them that they have landed on a page with the content they came for and the way to navigate to that content should be very clear. Do not try to give them everything on the front page.

Ease of Use
How easy is it for your visitors to accomplish what they came to do? Do they need to fill out pages of information or can the do their business in a few clicks? If people have to figure out the puzzle that your website is they will move on unless you have something so attractive and necessary that they will stay at all costs. If you have a product like that then you can not charge enough for it.

It is always a good idea to have a professional web designer look over the site and point out any obvious flaws. I say obvious flaws because not all corrections are obvious and are often discovered through trial and error. You should keep tweaking the website in a continuous attempt to improve it. There is always room for improvement. Though it is also said that you should not fix something that works. I think that the best thing is to make gradual changes and if they are not a major improvement, at least they will not be a major disaster.
About the Author: Steven Collins is a web designer

Get in contact with 1260 and get your name, product or information out there.

How to reduce risk when you start up online

‘Fail fast and fail cheap‘ is a piece of advice that’s embedded in Internet culture. It’s also a piece of advice that many Internet entrepreneurs and established businesses fail to fully understand.

Let’s strip away that idea of failing, for a moment. Let’s modify it to ‘launch fast and cheap‘. Many small businesses and start-ups soon get carried away with launching and lose sight of how they should be spending their budget.

Look before you leap
I see an amazing number of new businesses blowing all their start-up capital on a wonderful-looking & full featured e-commerce Web site, without any idea of whether they have a viable business idea or not. Having commissioned that huge project of a site, they are then are faced with the problem of how to get customers to visit with the little budget that remains.
They are the people who find themselves being sucked in by the often dubious practitioners who claim that marketing a Web site is cheap, instantaneous and totally effective in the long term.

Lack of online marketing budget may not be a big problem if you’re planning to market properly offline, but if the expectation is that your business will operate and be marketed 100% online, then ‘fail fast’ is exactly what you’ll do. All the money put into the site will be teetering perilously close to the precipice.

That’s what I call failing expensive.

How to save failing expensive

While it’s a huge temptation to go out and get that big online presence built – of course, it’s human nature to want to see something tangible – it can cost you a lot of money.

Proceed carefully. Don’t blow the budget (or your own time) on building a site and on branding until you know you could have a business. By all means, think up a business name, buy a domain, create a presence/information page but go no further until you’ve found out if your business idea has a chance online.

What do you need to know?
Just because there’s a market out there for what you’re hoping to sell, there’s no reason to believe you’re going to be successful online. Suppose you’re in financial services, a regional financial adviser with a few offices perhaps? You’re going to be running up against the marketing budgets of the banks and other huge financial institutions, and life is going to be very tough.

But, whatever your business, you’ll need answers to two fundamental questions:

1. Can you expect to get a first-page natural search position on Google within your budget or available time and resources?

or

2. Can a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign be run profitably?

If you can make a clear case for Organic SEO success, you should be more confident of the future of your business. Organic SEO is much more under your control than PPC/SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Carried out properly, using ethical methodologies, it’ll give you the lowest risk route forward.

If you need to rely on PPC for your customers, the future could be far more uncertain. You’re relying on being able to buy traffic at a price that enables you to remain profitable when the price is changing constantly – yes, PPC is more auction than anything else.

If the price you need to pay for your traffic increases significantly, you’ll either be running at a loss or you’ll need to stop buying traffic entirely until the prices (CPCs) come down. What will cutting off the supply of customers do to your business plan?

Getting the answers you need
The good news is that getting the answers you need before launch is considerably cheaper than getting a good Web site designed and built, and then running marketing experiments on the live site.

If you want to do the research yourself, the best approach is through taking these three steps:

1. Identify all the key phrases that prospective customers.
2. Rank the key phrases according to number of searches.
3. Work out the number of key phrases you need to get on the top page of Google by:

i) Running a Google search on the key phrase,
ii) Taking note of the domain name of the sites at the top and bottom of the first page (positions 1 and 10)
iii) Recording the number of links,
iv) Repeating this for each key phrase in your list and
v) Recording the figures in a spreadsheet.

You’re looking for the best balance of high numbers of searches and low numbers of links – the key phrases with the lowest numbers of incoming links are those that are easiest to target with your Organic SEO campaign. So you’ll know which key phrases to optimize on, and how many links you will need to build.

Alternatively, you can 1260 Productions and ask how they can provide an online marketing strategy for your site.

Whichever way you go forward, it will be an investment well spent, allowing you to embark on a great site design and build from 1260, knowing that your online business has an excellent chance of succeeding in attracting the traffic it will need.